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telegraph road

Have you ever heard Telegraph Road? It is a 1982 song by Dire Straits about the building of America, spanning decades, following the rise and fall of a city built around the ‘Telegraph Road’. The song is more than 14 minutes long. Rolling Stone magazine called the entire album, Love over Gold, [an] “almost suicidal defiance of commercial good sense”. They weren’t wrong.

Commercial good sense it something any artist encounters, and accepts or rejects accordingly. This post is not in favour of either – they both have their merit – but I’d like to give a shout out to those going for the ballsy latter option: reject. Run the risk of not being heard or read, of being overlooked and ignored, of not being paid.

It is not an easy decision, and one has to be very certain of both oneself and one’s art to go down the route of Telegraph Road, knowing that there might easily be nothing but destitution and unemployment at the end. I’m impressed by those who do it, whether they succeed or not, because within that group there are movers and shakers and creators of novelty.

But there is another way of walking that road. It’s also walked by the hordes of people who have the fortune of being able to follow the sage old advice: keep the day job. And I like those too, for all that they might feel as if they are not ‘proper’ musicians, writers, artists and so on, just because they don’t live off of their artistic endeavours. Keep the day job and be free to try new things, knowing that they may never support you, that they don’t have to do so.

I like my day job. It gives me freedom. Freedom to throw caution to the wind, to aim for something that may be new and could be good. (Caveat: it may also be shit – you never know until you try.) Having not hinged my finances on my writing, I can write what I like and still have enough to eat. In short, there are no large penalties to lack of popularity. It’s a less perilous Telegraph Road.

Love over Gold succeeded, despite being weird to the point of failure. Why? Well, there is perhaps another lesson there, beyond any thoughts on the purpose of free art and whether or not financial security plays a role in supporting it. And that lesson is: write Love over Gold after Making Movies. There’s a lot to be said for having an album that sold to platinum in several markets in your backpack when you’re trying something new. But you’ll have to ask someone other than me for any inside information about that.